Public Service Ethics and Administrative Evil: Prospects and Problems

By

Guy B. Adams

University of Missouri-Columbia

And

Danny L. Balfour

Grand Valley State University

September 2003

A Century of Progress.

--title of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair

Science Explores, Technology Executes, Mankind Conforms.

--motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair

In the acclaimed novel The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro (1988), the central character, Mr. Stevens, reflects on his life of faithful service as butler to Lord Darlington (a British aristocrat and diplomat). Mr. Stevens takes great pride in his high standards of professionalism and the supporting role he played in Lord Darlington’s attempts to keep the peace in Europe and support accommodative policies towards a defeated Germany during the years between the World Wars. Lord Darlington arranged numerous informal meetings of key politicians and diplomats at his palatial home in the English countryside where great affairs of state were negotiated over fine food, wine, and cigars. But Mr. Stevens must also struggle with the fact that his employer lost faith in democracy, succumbing to the temptations of fascism in difficult times, and failed to appreciate the true nature of Hitler and his regime, even to the point of supporting anti-Semitism and lauding the economic and social “achievements” of Nazism in the mid-1930s. Lord Darlington’s efforts were ultimately discredited and he died in disgrace soon after World War II.

Mr. Stevens, a consummate professional, sees no connection between his actions and the moral and strategic failures of his employer. In a remarkable example of perverse moral reasoning, Stevens comes to the conclusion that his professional behavior shields him from any moral responsibility for his employer’s actions (Ishiguro 1998, 201):

How can one possibly be held to blame in any sense because, say, the passage of time has shown that Lord Darlington's efforts were misguided, even foolish? Throughout the years I served him, it was he and he alone who weighed up evidence and judged it best to proceed in the way he did, while I simply confined myself, quite properly, to affairs within my own professional realm. And as far as I am concerned, I carried out my duties to the best of my abilities, indeed to a standard which many may consider 'first rate'. It is hardly my fault if his lordship's life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad waste -- and it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account.

Mr. Stevens’ justification of his role and abdication of responsibility in Lord Darlington’s affairs is a clear example of what we have termed administrative evil. The common characteristic of administrative evil is that ordinary people within their normal professional and administrative roles can engage in acts of evil without being aware that they are doing anything wrong. While a “professional” butler may perhaps seem an odd exemplar of administrative evil, Stevens pursues every new technique and practice in his chosen profession with the greatest diligence. Yet, it is his myopic focus on his administrative role and professional “standards” that serve to mask his own contributions to the evil that stemmed from Darlington’s moral failures. “Just following orders,” his dismissal of two housekeepers whose only offense was that they were Jewish does not stir his conscience, among many other such examples in the novel. Mr. Stevens carries on by stubbornly denying that he did anything wrong and by asserting instead that he actually did everything “right,” that is, professionally correct.

Administrative evil is regrettably a recurring aspect of public policy and administration in the modern era. The same reasoning and behaviors employed by Mr. Stevens mask the supporting (and at times, primary) role, played by far too many professionals and administrators in acts that dehumanize, injure, and even kill, their fellow human beings. Our reluctant and tragic conclusion is that administrative evil is unlikely to disappear from a world order that depends so heavily on organizations and professions that systematically enable its reproduction.

In recent times, we have seen an escalation of violence and uncertainty worldwide, punctuated for Americans by the terrible events of September 11, 2001 (for analyses of this escalation, see Juergensmeryer 2000; Lifton 1999; Volkan 1997). While those events were not an example of administrative evil, they certainly have led to a dramatic increase in references to “evil” in public discourse. Richard Bernstein provides us an important assessment (2002, x):

Few would hesitate to name what happened on that day as evil-indeed, the very epitome of evil in our time. Yet, despite the complex emotions and responses that the events have evoked, there is a great deal of uncertainty about what is meant by calling them evil. There is an all too familiar popular rhetoric of ‘evil’ that becomes fashionable as such critical moments, which actually obscures and blocks serious thinking about the meaning of evil. ‘Evil’ is used to silence thinking and to demonize what we refuse to understand.

Although it might initially seem odd for us not to welcome greater use of a term which we have argued is in fact underused in the social science literature, we agree completely with Bernstein that the proliferation of “evil talk” in public discourse undermines our understanding of dynamics about which we very much need all the insight we can gain. At the same time, there has been increased attention to the topic of evil in the scholarly literature, epitomized by Bernstein (2002) and Neiman (2002), and this development we welcome wholeheartedly because much of this new scholarship offers support for our argument in key areas (Adams and Balfour, 2004, forthcoming).

What is Administrative Evil?

We begin with the premise that evil is an essential concept for understanding the human condition. As one examines the sweep of human history, clearly there have been many great and good deeds and achievements, and real progress in the quality of at least many humans’ lives. But, we also see century after century of mind-numbing, human-initiated violence, betrayal and tragedy. We name as evil the actions of human beings that unjustly or needlessly inflict pain and suffering and death on other human beings. However, evil is one of those phenomena in human affairs that defies easy definition and understanding (See Garrard, 2002; Katz, 1988; McGinn, 1997; Sanford, 1981; Steiner, 2002). As Reinhold Niebuhr (1986, 246) wisely noted, “We see through a glass darkly when we seek to understand the cause and nature of evil…But we see more profoundly when we know it is through a dark glass that we see, than if we pretend to have clear light on this profound problem.”

Evil is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the antithesis of good in all its principle senses. Staub (1992, p. 25) offers a more expansive characterization: “Evil is not a scientific concept with an agreed meaning, but the idea of evil is part of a broadly shared human cultural heritage. The essence of evil is the destruction of human beings…By evil I mean actions that have such consequences.” And Katz (1993, p.5) provides a useful, behavioral definition of evil as, “...behavior that deprives innocent people of their humanity, from small scale assaults on a person's dignity to outright murder... (this definition) focuses on how people behave toward one another -- where the behavior of one person, or an aggregate of persons is destructive to others.”

These definitions, while helpful, can be further refined. Rather than a continuum of evil as suggested in Katz’ definition, we propose a continuum of evil and wrongdoing, with horrible, mass eruptions of evil, such as the Holocaust and other genocides, at one extreme, and the "small" white lie, which is somewhat hurtful, at the other (Staub, 1992, p. xi). Somewhere along this continuum, wrongdoing turns into evil, and depending on both context and particulars, this changeover may occur at differing locations on the continuum. At the white lie end of the continuum, use of the term wrongdoing seems more apt than using evil. However, Sissela Bok (1978) has argued persuasively that even so-called white lies can have serious personal and social consequences, especially as they accrue over time. For the most part, we are concerned with the end of the continuum where the recognition of evil may be easier and more obvious. Nonetheless, the small-scale, wrongdoing end of the continuum remains of importance, because the road to great evil often begins with seemingly small, first steps of wrongdoing. Staub (1992, p xi) notes correctly that, “Extreme destructiveness…is usually the last of many steps along a continuum of destruction.”

Technical Rationality and Administrative Evil

The modern age, especially the 20th century, has had as its hallmark what we call technical rationality. Technical rationality is a way of thinking and living (a culture) that emphasizes the scientific-analytic mindset and faith in technological progress. For our purposes here, the culture of technical rationality has enabled a new and bewildering form of evil that we call administrative evil. What is different about administrative evil is that its appearance is masked. Administrative evil may be masked in many different ways, but the common characteristic is that people can engage in acts of evil without being aware that they are in fact doing anything at all wrong. Indeed, ordinary people may simply be acting appropriately in their organizational role- in essence, just doing what those around them would agree they should be doing- and at the same time, participating in what a critical and reasonable observer, usually well after the fact, would call evil. Even worse, under conditions of what we call moral inversion, in which something evil has been redefined convincingly as good, ordinary people can all too easily engage in acts of administrative evil while believing that what they are doing is not only correct, but in fact, good.

The basic difference between evil as it has appeared throughout human history, and administrative evil, which is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, is that the latter is less easily recognized as evil. People have always been able to delude themselves into thinking that their evil acts are not really so bad, and we have certainly had moral inversions in times past. But there are three very important differences in administrative evil. One is our modern inclination to un-name evil, an old concept that does not lend itself well to the scientific-analytic mindset (Bernstein, 2002, Neiman, 2002). The second difference is found in the structure of the modern, complex organization, which diffuses individual responsibility and requires the compartmentalized accomplishment of role expectations in order to perform work on a daily basis (Staub, 1992, p. 84). The third difference is the way in which the culture of technical rationality has analytically narrowed the processes by which public policy is formulated and implemented, so that moral inversions are now more likely.

Evil and Administrative Evil in the Modern Age

Evil is only a barely accepted entry in the lexicon of the social sciences. Social scientists much prefer to describe behavior, avoiding ethically loaded or judgmental rubrics -- to say nothing of what is often considered religious phraseology. Yet, evil reverberates down through the centuries of human history, showing little sign of weakening in the opening years of the twenty-first century and the apex of modernity (Lang, 1991). In the modern age, we are greatly enamored with the notion of progress, of the belief that civilization develops in a positive direction, with the present age at the pinnacle of human achievement. These beliefs constrain us from acknowledging the implications of the fact that the twentieth century was the bloodiest, both in absolute and relative terms, in human history, and that we continue to develop the capacity for even greater mass destruction (Rummel, 1994).

Nearly two hundred million human beings were slaughtered or otherwise killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the epidemic of wars and state-sponsored violence in the 20th century (Rummel, 1994; Eliot, 1968; Bauman, 1989; Glover, 1999). Administrative mass murder and genocide have become a demonstrated capacity within the human social repertoire (Rubenstein, 1975; 1983), and simply because such events have occurred, new instances of genocide and dehumanization become more likely (Arendt, 1963). As Bernstein states (2002, p. iv):

Looking back over the horrendous twentieth century, few of us would hesitate to speak of evil. Many people believe that the evils witnessed in the twentieth century exceed anything that has ever been recorded in past history. Most of us do not hesitate to speak about these extreme events-genocides, massacres, torture, terrorist attacks, the infliction of gratuitous suffering-as evil.

If we are to have any realistic hope for ameliorating this trajectory in the 21st century, administrative evil needs to be better understood, especially by those likely to participate in any future acts of mass destruction-- professionals and citizens who are active in public affairs.

Despite its enormous scale and tragic result, it took more than 25 years for the Holocaust to emerge as the major topic of study and public discussion that we know it as today. But knowing more about the Holocaust does not necessarily mean that we really understand it, or that future genocides will be prevented (Power, 2002). Within our own culture and closer to our own time, the dynamics of administrative evil become progressively more subtle and opaque. Administrative evil is not easily identified as such, because its appearance is masked.